Barcelona 03 - The Sound of One Hand Killing by Teresa Solana & Peter Bush

Author:Teresa Solana & Peter Bush [Solana, Teresa & Bush, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Action & Adventure, International Mystery & Crime
ISBN: 9781908524065
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2013-05-07T07:00:00+00:00

15

When I came round, my first thought was that it had all been a nightmare and I still hadn’t woken up. However, that fantasy only lasted a few seconds, because the stabbing pain I felt in my arms and wrists, and the panic attack that overwhelmed me the moment I realized my mouth had been gagged, brought it all back to me: I had been taken prisoner by total strangers and, even worse, they spoke languages I didn’t understand, so I couldn’t communicate with them. The scared look on Borja’s face gradually came back to me, as did the punches, his bloody nose and the way he’d been dragged out of the room by men who’d forced him to go back to Barcelona to get that damned statue. I also recalled we were a long way from home, in China, a country where I wouldn’t be missed if I disappeared, because, apart from Borja and our kidnappers, nobody knew I was there.

I could still see the Great Wall through the window and the tears clouding my vision, and it was a chilling reminder that nobody would come to my rescue in such a far-flung spot. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my whole life, and I felt completely numb. I was incapable of thought: all I wanted was to return home and for none of this ever to have happened. Why the hell couldn’t my brother be a normal person with a normal job, as they said in that beer advert? Why did he have to be a Walter Mitty and get involved in these kinds of mess, rather than being happy to contemplate the lives of the wealthy in glossy magazines and on the TV, like the rest of us mortals?

I found it hard to breathe with that gag over my mouth, and my heart was racing. I realized that putting the blame on Borja wasn’t going to help me out of that situation and that I should calm down. I tried to slow my rhythm of breathing for a few minutes by taking deep breaths in and out of my nose; almost imperceptibly, my heart started to beat at a more reasonable rate and I gradually calmed down. My situation was too serious to risk a fatal heart attack.

I took one last deep breath and glanced around me. I concluded I hadn’t been unconscious for very long after they’d taken Borja off: the light coming through the window, an afternoon light that was gently, monotonously turning into dusk, hadn’t really changed. Although I was sitting down, the stance I had been forced to adopt was excruciating, because my arms were tied behind me to the back of the chair and the rough string knotted around my wrists cut into my skin; I could move my feet, which weren’t tied at all, but had pins and needles in my hands and that indicated they were about to lose all feeling because of the lack of any blood flow.

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